Battle to Capture Military Voters Is Joined

Soldiers with the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, or “Old Guard,” check Section 60 to make sure each grave has a flag in honor of Memorial Day, during the annual “Flags-In” at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., on Thursday, May 24, 2012.

As Memorial Day weekend nears, veterans and the military vote have become a more serious focus in the 2012 campaign. In the last few weeks, President Barack Obama has reached out to military voters on the Web and on TV with the aim of slicing away pieces of what has been a reliable part of the Republican base.

Since the Cold War, the GOP’s reputation for being the party of a “strong national defense” has generally won it loyal and crucial support from active duty soldiers and veterans. In 2004, President George W. Bush won the veteran vote by a solid 16 percentage points and that was campaigning against a decorated Vietnam veteran in Sen. John Kerry.

But in 2008 that margin shrank. Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain still won the veteran vote, but by only 10 percentage points. And in 2012 Mr. Obama looks eager to cut into that difference even more.

Even a slight shift in the military/veteran vote could be critical in what many expect to be a very close presidential race.

There are roughly 22 million veterans in the U.S., and if you look on the map below you can see they are spread throughout the country but clustered in some battleground states – Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Colorado. In all those states the number of veterans per 1,000 people exceeds the national average.

It is dangerous to think of the veteran vote as a monolith. There are, after all, many different kinds of veterans – young and old, enlisted and officers, black and white, urban and rural. Still, taken as a whole, military voters share a common experience that separates them from others and they are generally more keenly aware of or focused on national defense issues.

Patchwork Nation’s demographic/geographic breakdown of the U.S. tries to examine the military vote through a group of counties it calls Military Bastions. Those places tend to be located near major installations and have higher-than-average numbers of veterans – more than 11 for every 100 citizens – and that doesn’t count the active-duty personnel and base contractors in those places. They are in purple on the map below and, again, they show up in those important swing states.

On the whole the Bastions were very good to Mr. Obama in 2008. He lost the vote coming out of those 55 counties in 2008, but only by about three percentage points. That was far better than the previous two Democratic presidential nominees had done; both former Vice President Al Gore and Mr. Kerry lost the Bastions by double digits. And considering that Mr. Obama is now facing an opponent in Mr. Romney who has no military background, there may be reason to believe he should do even better in those counties.

But the votes around those military installations can be tricky. On a trip this past week to the community around Fort Campbell, the massive base that straddles northern Tennessee and southern Kentucky, many locals said the soldiers were tired and happy to be home after as many as five deployments. They were not eager to be deployed again anytime soon.

But Mr. Obama’s positions are not necessarily a slam-dunk for winning the military vote or Military Bastion counties. Some of those near Fort Campbell noted that the defense budget cuts proposed by the Obama administration may make a career in the military harder to realize for young soldiers. They may ultimately mean more base closures and there have been rumblings from Republicans that schools on military bases may be cut. These are all issues near and dear to military communities.

All of which is to say that the Obama campaign might see a target of opportunity in the military vote, but the target is moving and not easily captured. The set of issues that make up the current “national defense” debate are complicated. They could break in several different ways and just a slight break for one candidate or the other could prove decisive.

In short, the battle for the military vote just started getting hot around Memorial Day, but expect it to carry on until just about Veterans Day – days after the November election.

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